If mom, dad, or the government wants to supply a freshman with a brand-new laptop, that's fine. But don't let someone dig deeper into debt, or hoard their dough, for a new laptop. It's often, as one writer suggests, entirely unnecessary.

CrunchGear, TechCrunch's hardware-focused sister site, makes a compelling argument for buying a "janky old computer" off Craigslist or from another source, then simply loading it up with Ubuntu and classifying it as a simple work/email/Facebook/MP3 machine. It's not just the cost of a brand new laptop you'd be saving, the post suggests; it's twice or three times the cost, if you're accident-prone or unlucky in theft:

That janky old laptop you buy from Craigslist will not be as attractive a target for theft as a brand new computer. If it does get stolen, you won't be out as much cash. No, it won't be a speed demon, but what do you seriously plan to do with it? Type some papers, read some emails, Facebook ...

You're not going to play games on your college laptop. Your roommate, or someone in your hall, will have an Xbox 360. Someone else will have a PS3, and there's a strong chance that there'll be a Wii somewhere, too. Make friends with these people and play their games. Save yourself the grief of soda spilled into your own precious gaming console.

... You're also not going to use your used laptop as a media PC to stream movies in your room. Oh sure, you can, but you'll be watching those things alone: none of your friends are going to want to crowd around your 14″ laptop screen to watch anything. ... You can, however, load up your laptop with MP3s so that you can rock out (with headphones on if you have a roommate) while cranking out that paper on Plato's Republic.

"Ubuntu to the rescue" is something of an evergreen idea among bloggers, but it seems like a valid argument from a lot of angles, including the separation of your "work machine" (the janky laptop) and the "fun machine" (Xbox 360, PS3, Roku box, etc.).

Got your own war story of getting by with the bare minimum computer in college? You know we like those war stories in the comments.